Trends in the evolution of scholarly accounting thought: A quantitative examination

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The Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 15, No. 1 Spring 1988
Miklos A. Vasarhelyi Da Hsien Bao and Joel Berk
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
TRENDS IN THE EVOLUTION OF SCHOLARLY ACCOUNTING THOUGHT: A QUANTITATIVE EXAMINATION
The authors are grateful for the assistance of Georgiana Hsu of Columbia University. The comments and suggestions of Professors L. Brown, R. Colson, J. Gardner, N. Preis, G. Previts, and D. Yang, Messrs. W. J. Shugard and H. S. Tsao of the AT&T Bell Laboratories as well as two anonymous referees are greatly appreciated.
Abstract: Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR) has expanded substantially in scope over the past two decades. This paper provides an overview of these trends using both quantitative techniques from statistics and exploratory data analysis (EDA). Articles in CAR are classified into taxonomies and the literature tracked over 22 years.
Analysis focuses on four taxonomies: foundation discipline, school of thought, research method and mode of reasoning. The paper first examines journals vis-a-vis article publication fre-quency and dominant taxonomies. Secondly, three assertions con-cerning the relative posture of the Journal of Accounting Research and the literature are examined. Next the context of the literature is examined through major taxonomies and a crosstabulation of research method vs school of thought. The last part of the analysis focuses on trends within the taxonomies in the 1963-1984 period.
1. INTRODUCTION
The past two decades have witnessed a rigorous process of paradigm development, interdisciplinary "borrowing", hypothesis testing, and theory refinement in the literature of accounting. Both the volume and breath of this research have created difficulties in understanding its current trends, apply-ing its results, and generating a coherent set of accounting theories that are grounded in its history.
Notwithstanding this difficulty, numerous surveys have provided extensive classification and evaluation of this body of research. However, the focus of these surveys has been typi-cally on an accounting area (e.g., auditing, budgeting) or a school of thought (e.g., human information processing, agency